


best laid plans

by newsbypostcard



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:18:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>25 easy-to-follow steps to falling in love with the biggest idiot in the galaxy. Now featuring Step #15:</p><p>
  <em>15. you find you stand on the bridge a lot. you are comfortable there; that’s where space is, it’s where you can see it, where you can keep an eye on it, where you can see what’s coming; and that’s where <em>he</em> is, too, god help you, this loose cannon who manages to wrangle space into a headlock and throw it down with barely more than a flex of the phalanges and a stretch in the captain’s chair. you feel safer here, for whatever reason, and you wrap your arms around themselves and bark at your subordinates to assuage whatever anxiety is left; and by the way he keeps catching your eye, you get the sense that short of any doctoring to be done, there’s nowhere else you ought to be.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	best laid plans

**Author's Note:**

> cw: emetophobia (brief mention, step 19)
> 
> stylistically most inspired by [postcardmystery's 'world ablaze' series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/51896) for pacific rim, though there are clear demarcations. the point-form style and white wine were joint influences honestly.

1\. you met at a crossroads -- or maybe shortly after it. you’d each taken the right fork, separately, together, coincidentally, and wasn’t that the damndest thing. you’d found it so easy before now, too easy, to keep left, to be gauche, to forget you were a dignified man with too many letters attached to your name, to do nothing but breathe in skin and sweat and booze and sex for six solid months. but some magnanimous force of will had brought you here, next to this kid who was staring at you like a fox who’d tested the trap just to see if it’d snap on his foot, eyeballing your flask in a campaign to temper the instinct to fight or flight. he softens as you offer it to him, no longer wary of you but seeing you as the fox alongside; and you wonder, briefly, if the God you’d long since disregarded really did have a plan for you after all.

2\. at first, you thought, it was concern. fraternal concern. brotherly. _familial_. here was this kid, in the thick of himself and one precarious misstep away from a mistake he’d never recover from, just the same as you were, only six years younger and without enough time passed to have learned where his limits were. you had more experience; damnit, you had a kid and an ex-wife and child support and alimony, and this kid had _nothing_ , so, yeah, you threw in a little extra in alongside the usual doctor-mccoy bit, started going along to the bar just to make sure he didn’t get his lights punched out, or if he did that it didn’t leave a scar; started ordering another round just to get the damn kid to stop looking like he was going to launch out of his seat and run a marathon in five-minute miles if he didn’t stay grounded; started giving him a reason to stay still. and eventually, to your astonishment, he _does_ stay still; and in no time at all you’re stuck sitting across from the kid most days of the week. yet more surprising, you don’t hate it. not completely. not entirely.

3\. he calls you “bones,” because that’s where your essence lies. you call him “jim,” because no one else will. he’s “kirk” to everyone else, living in the shadow of his father, just the same as you’re living in the shadow of having killed yours; and to your complete astonishment, you become each other’s refuge.

4\. space is and forever shall be disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence, but he talks you into feeling okay about that, somehow, over a bottle of whiskey in the observatory one night in july after your first year of academy. that’s new, you realize, feeling the same way about something but liking it more just because someone agrees with you. “c’mon, bones, you know better than to believe that earth is any better,” he says, slumping drunkenly over your shoulder sometime after midnight; and your hand rests on his fair-haired scalp, massages absently in as you reply, “well you’re goddamn right about that,” and you stare into the stars thinking, _well all right, then_ ; and suddenly this starfleet lark doesn’t seem so fucking ridiculous after all.

5\. it’s october the first time he says “tarsus,” and it’s october again before he says it the second time. you look it up and only need to read the first paragraph of the official records before realizing that some history is best left buried. it’s another october still before he tells you about it after all, and you realize that, actually, no, you were mistaken, nothing like this should ever be fucking buried, and you spend the next two weeks spending twelve hour days reading every file you can find at the expense of your clinic duties and to the chagrin of your bank account. but for better or worse, at the end of it, you feel like you’re starting to understand this fox who tests the trap just for the challenge, and suddenly you don’t blame him for fighting anymore.

6\. it’s uhura who identifies that you make him different -- “civilize” is the word she uses -- and you stammer to defend him. “you _believe_ in him, don’t you?” she asks; and you say immediately, “I don’t think enough people do.” her eyes spark with comprehension, and you’re not clear as to why; but your ears smoulder as she pats you on the arm and walks away, ponytail swishing from side to side in the _warm_ room, which is warm.

7\. later, you take your temperature. it is normal. you update your vaccinations just in case.

8\. it’s february before you say “my father.” it’s february again before you say it the second time -- but this time you tell him the whole thing, everything, from start to finish. midway through he hooks his foot around your heel under the table of the bar and says nothing, only listens, stares you dead in the face without the slightest falter and _really listens_ , and it’s the first time you ever get through the entire story. when you’re finished, the only things he says are, “we do what we have to,” and, “I’m so fucking sorry you had to, bones,” and that’s it, that’s everything, that’s all she wrote; and god _damn_ it, the kid had more wisdom than you could’ve ever guessed.

9\. “we think we’re invincible,” he says quietly. it’s january 4th and he’s leaned against a tree and staring at the night sky and cradling a large bottle of wine in one arm, and you think _christ what a mess_ at the same time as you think _fuck you are beautiful_ , and you can only sit down next to him and stare with him. “no one’s invincible, jimmy, not even you,” you offer, and he replies, “especially not me, bones.” your hand finds the back of his neck, and his finds the inside of your thigh, and it’s the least appropriate time to get hard, but shit, space is terrifying, or thrilling, or whatever, so why the fuck not.

10\. it’s two years before you finally believe him when he says he’s going to be captain someday.

11\. it’s also two years before you realize the concern is more than fraternal.

12\. he never shuts up about space, you realize. space this and space that, and it’s terrifying-or-thrilling-or-whatever to you every fucking time he brings it up. he talks about it, and you think one of those adjectives that are the standby, silence and disease and darkness and danger or what _ever_ , like you care anymore, because somehow, _somehow_ , you realize that every time you look into space you get hard, and the danger and darkness and silence are more than okay, suddenly, and disease you can treat, so really there’s no problem, right?

13\. you decide he’s brainwashed you. you look up brainwashing. you don’t recognize any of the signs. you brush up on your fetishization literature, as though you didn’t already have the psych credentials. that seems more likely. you decide that’s it. totally independent of anyone’s obsession with space or your obsession with anyone. you are a medical professional and this is your esteemed conclusion, so it is damned near irrefutable.

14\. you are assigned to the enterprise, and he is grounded. he is grounded and you are a senior medical officer on his ship -- or _the_ ship, damnit, _whatever_ \-- but either way it turns out you can’t leave him behind, so you pull a jim kirk and get him aboard. despite his complaints you know he appreciates you for it by the way he leans against you, heat radiating off of him in great crashing waves, his fingers gripping precariously at your uniform, and seriously, now, this is unacceptable, you are a medical professional abroad starfleet’s flagship, you’ve got to stop getting hard like this.

15\. you find you stand on the bridge a lot. you are comfortable there; that’s where space is, it’s where you can see it, where you can keep an eye on it, where you can see what’s coming; and that’s where _he_ is, too, god help you, this loose cannon who manages to wrangle space into a headlock and throw it down with barely more than a flex of the phalanges and a stretch in the captain’s chair. you feel safer here, for whatever reason, and you wrap your arms around themselves and bark at your subordinates to assuage whatever anxiety is left; and by the way he keeps catching your eye, you get the sense that short of any doctoring to be done, there’s nowhere else you ought to be.

16\. soon there is doctoring to be done, though, and it’s a long three days without sleep. he’s at your door when finally your hands are clean of blood, gaze direct and intense and looking like the fox who’s tested the trap and regretted his decision; and you step aside without a second’s hesitation to let him in. you open a very old bottle of bourbon.

17\. “we think we’re invincible,” he whispers again, and his voice is tight in his throat as he flexes his hand around the tumbler. you hook a foot around his heel this time and lean forward with your elbows on your knees and say, “no one thinks that, and no one expects you save them.” your hands come together to steady your own glass, and he looks at you with a level of stark honesty you know is meant for no one else. “you neither, bones,” he says quietly, and in that moment you understand each other, staring at each other like this; and suddenly you fucking _know_ , and you lean back with the force of it.

18\. the thing about love is that it’s incremental. it came to you in moments over years, crept over you and settled, like it had always been part of you, like the warmth belonged there in your chest and would never leave. you watch him in the days following as he strives to reconstruct, realizing you’ve felt this for a long time and will feel it for a long time still, and you only want to live in it, live with it, live alongside it, crawl into it, to be part of it as it is part of you. it’s been ten fucking years since you’ve felt anything this intense and it’s the best and worst thing about your entire life as far as you’re concerned. you doctor and you help him rebuild without saying a single word about it, and it’s like nothing has changed, but at the same time everything has changed, and you are electric and exhausted all at once.

19\. he dies. you spend two weeks not eating, not sleeping, doctoring, and dry-retching into trash cans until he’s alive again. it’s another three weeks after that before you can face him without biting out a cynical comment. you forgive each other eventually, and another eventually later it’s almost as though nothing happened -- except that you still have nightmares about the body bag.

20\. you never wanted anything from him, really, apart from him to be alive and himself. you never wanted him to come to you when they were all going to die again, two full years later, after that spark had gone from his eyes and found its way back, when the enterprise was stuck in the gradual slip of an event horizon of a class one singularity, when he should’ve been on the bridge to direct the crew through the crisis but instead was in sickbay and staring you right in the face. you never wanted him to take only an instant of eye contact before snapping into you, his hands climbing under your shirt and running shakily over your ribs as he kissed you with the sort of delicacy one expected from a teenaged boy. you never wanted to grab his face and bring him in closer, like his lips were the best chance at life you had left, and you never wanted him to kiss back deeper and with tongue and to rut against you as he backed you against the wall. you never wanted, necessarily, to pull the head of his cock out of his pants to run your thumb against it while the rest of your hand squeezed and tugged through the fabric, and you never wanted him to groan and shudder and lean his forehead against your shoulder with the force of it. you never wanted him to come into your hand as you murmured sweet nothings you hadn’t even known still existed within you into his ear, and you never (specifically) wanted him to fall to his knees and take you in his mouth with the sort of warmth and affection and pure _want_ that made you whimper stupidly with your head leaned against the wall and a wrist pressed over your mouth to stifle the sounds as he sucked the last morsel of authoritative decorum out of you. you never wanted any of this, but there it is anyway, presented to you with the sort of factuality that a scientist like you should appreciate wholeheartedly but can only blush about in retrospect; and when you’ve come and gone and arrived back at full awareness to find his head resting against your hip and your hand in his hair, sulu announces over his personal comm that uhura had gotten on the line a ferengi ship who was willing to trade in exchange for rescue. he steps away with a flushed expression and wordlessly pulls himself together enough to give you a silent look of extreme urgency before scampering hurriedly back to the bridge -- and you realize as your stomach drops out of you that you would have preferred to have none of it at all, to operate instead in the middling void of unrequited love, to continue to appreciate everything that he was without expectation rather than live in this hell in which everything you wanted had been briefly offered to you and then taken away by the forces of goddamned _space_. it’s then, with your pants around your ankles, abandoned in your own office while your commanding officer runs off to save everyone’s lives -- including your own -- that you realize you were never meant for this gig after all.

21\. he denies your request for a transfer. he knocks at your door for as long as a captain can afford to budget the time, for over two solid days and a bit of the third. this occurs to you, faintly, as you pack your things anyway. you think about facing him, but decide it would not be so bad to defect, ultimately -- comparatively. you’ve heard good things about the outer colonies -- at least, insofar as there was no one there to whom to prove oneself.

22\. you never wanted him, either, to show up in the cargo bay when something twigs him to the fact that you’re leaving while the enterprise is stationed for repairs outside of minshara. you never wanted him to try to ‘reason’ with you in a way that makes you realize that _he’s_ angry with _you_ , somehow, that he feels _justified_ in his captainly position to take a detached and commanding tone with you to remind you just who’s boss; but you’re smarter than that, you know better than to listen to the writhing in your gut, and you power up in spite of it all, turning away in the hopes that not looking will make it easier. but then, of course, you never expected him to break suddenly, to throw himself in front of the shuttle as you complete the final steps and to plant his hands on the windscreen, to shout, “don’t,” tone steady and authoritative but also desperate and personal as his eyes reflected the same panic you thought must have been in your eyes the first day you boarded that shuttle and shared with him of your flask. and then you never wanted your hand to pause on the switches, never wanted to stare him down as he mouths “bones” on the other side of the glass, never wanted to power down in spite of yourself, and never wanted to sit and let it happen as he climbed into the shuttle with you and clasped his hand in your collar to give you a chaste and angry kiss. “fuck you,” he says, and you grab his shirt in both hands and say “fuck you” back, and you never wanted him to straddle over you but he does anyway, mutters in your ear that he didn't want to die without you again, and you rut in the shuttle like goddamned teenagers, and that was _definitely_ nothing you _ever_ actively wanted--

23\. but you have it. suddenly, you have all of it. you have every part of it. you have every part of him under your hands and in your mouth and against your skin. you never wanted it, not specifically, but it’s here. god fucking help you, it’s all fucking here, and your heart beats with it, lives in it, crawls into it, breathes it all the hell in. 

24\. if not God -- _someone_ has a plan.

25\. “if you knew you weren’t invincible,” you ask him one day, slouched into one another with a bottle of bourbon on the topmost scaffolding of the engine room, “why did you go in?” his breath catches, and it’s several long seconds before the breath snakes out of him, before he remembers that he _can_ breathe, that this is a privilege afforded to him again. “because none of us are,” he says eventually, tugging at your arm with an air of need you feel from him only in his most vulnerable moments. you kiss his head, because you need to, and he kisses you properly, because he needs to, and scotty is going to have it out with you tomorrow for getting busy in his beloved engine room; but you met at a crossroads where you both took the right fork, and somehow it led you here, to fucking half-drunk in the engine room for no other reason than you need each other, and that’s some fucking space-grade bullshit right there that you’re not inclined to argue with.


End file.
